Kill Wasteful Missile Defense Efforts

In the 30 years, since President Ronald Reagan created his expensive pie-in-the-sky Strategic Defense Initiative—quickly and appropriately named “Star Wars” by critics and journalists alike—the United States has spent a whopping $250 billion on trying to shoot down fast intercontinental ballistic missiles, such as those that might someday be fielded by Iran and North Korea. This government effort has been a boondoggle, but then huge costs and poor performance rarely cause any government program to be terminated—evidence of this effect is exhibited by the continued flow of money to the project despite three decades of failure.

Any government program no matter how ridiculous, once established, develops constituency groups that then come to feel entitled to the benefits of the effort. In this case, huge defense contractors and smaller subcontracting companies pressure their members of Congress to keep the money flowing, no matter what the effectiveness of the missile defense program has been. And in the case of missile defense, it’s even worse. Hawkish Republicans guard the legacy of their nearly canonized “Gipper” by slathering the program with plenty of money. Of course, many at the Pentagon outside the missile defense office would like to cut or eliminate the program and use the money for what they consider more legitimate defense needs.

Violating good procurement practices, poorly designed missile interceptors were deployed before being thoroughly tested. And what tests have been done have been rigged to give the missile interceptor a better chance of hitting the incoming missile. Even so, according to press reports, missile interceptors of the ground-based mid-course intercept system have failed in eight of 16 tests against slower intermediate-range missiles (long-range intercontinental missiles are even faster and harder to hit), with the last three tests ending in failure. Studies by experts, both inside and outside the Pentagon, have questioned whether the system can ever be reliable or is worth its huge cost.

Even if the system’s reliability is eventually increased, however, it still may not be worth the cost. The problem with missile defense is that it has always been more expensive than building the offensive missiles the system is designed to counter. Although Reagan lovers have weaved the tale that Star Wars cowed the Soviets and won the Cold War, Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader during the later years of the Reagan administration, said that Star Wars really didn’t worry him because he could build more offensive missiles faster and more cheaply than the United States could build defenses.

Thus, the Star Wars system’s original grandiose goal of defending against Soviet missiles had to be scaled back—there were just too many of them. So the program morphed into a much more modest missile defense system against poorer rogue states, such as Iran and North Korea. Perhaps the system could knock down a few Wile E. Coyote-style missiles that these countries could muster up.

But as the previously cited test results have shown, reliable technology to achieve even this modest goal is likely to be elusive. And it is not needed anyway. Ever since World War II, the United States has very effectively relied on its huge offensive nuclear arsenal to deter other nations from attacking the United States with nuclear or conventional weapons. Smaller countries than Russia or China, such as Iran or North Korea, which could have their home address entirely wiped off the map with a fraction of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, have an even bigger incentive to avoid launching any future intercontinental missiles at the United States. So the bottom line is that 30 years of effort and cost on missile defense wasn’t needed anyway, given the fact that the U.S. offensive nuclear deterrent—the most powerful in the world—seems to work just fine.

Undeterred by such logic, and contradicting their rhetorical bombast against wasteful government spending, hawkish Republicans remain without shame about missile defense’s enormous costs and frequent failures. In fact, they want to spend additional billions on missile defense, adding tests, more unreliable interceptors on the west coast, and an entirely new missile defense installation on the east coast!

Instead, this white elephant should be killed before even more money is needlessly squandered at a time of huge federal budget deficits and a $17 trillion national debt.

DISCLAIMER: The opinions expressed here are those of the individual contributor(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the LA Progressive, its publisher, editor or any of its other contributors.

About Ivan Eland

Ivan Eland is Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at The Independent Institute. Dr. Eland is a graduate of Iowa State University and received an M.B.A. in applied economics and a Ph.D. in Public Policy from George Washington University. He has been Director of Defense Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, and he spent 15 years working for Congress on national security issues, including stints as an investigator for the House Foreign Affairs Committee and Principal Defense Analyst at the Congressional Budget Office. He also has served as Evaluator-in-Charge (national security and intelligence) for the U.S. General Accounting Office (now the Government Accountability Office), and has testified on the military and financial aspects of NATO expansion before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, on CIA oversight before the House Government Reform Committee, and on the creation of the Department of Homeland Security before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Dr. Eland is the author of The Empire Has No Clothes: U.S. Foreign Policy Exposed and Putting “Defense” Back into U.S. Defense Policy, as well as The Efficacy of Economic Sanctions as a Foreign Policy Tool. He is a contributor to numerous volumes and the author of 45 in-depth studies on national security issues.

His articles have appeared in American Prospect, Arms Control Today, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Emory Law Journal, The Independent Review, Issues in Science and Technology (National Academy of Sciences), Mediterranean Quarterly, Middle East and International Review, Middle East Policy, Nexus, Chronicle of Higher Education, American Conservative, International Journal of World Peace, and Northwestern Journal of International Affairs. Dr. Eland's popular writings have appeared in such publications as the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, USA Today, Houston Chronicle, Dallas Morning News, New York Times, Chicago Sun-Times, San Diego Union-Tribune, Miami Herald, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Newsday, Sacramento Bee, Orange County Register, Washington Times, Providence Journal, The Hill, and Defense News. He has appeared on ABC's “World News Tonight,” NPR's “Talk of the Nation,” PBS, Fox News Channel, CNBC, Bloomberg TV, CNN, CNN “Crossfire,” CNN-fn, C-SPAN, MSNBC, Canadian Broadcasting Corp. (CBC), Canadian TV (CTV), Radio Free Europe, Voice of America, BBC, and other local, national, and international TV and radio programs.

Comments

I have always thought the very concept was futile, so the cost a ridiculous waste, not to mention the impractical allocation of non-productive scientific endeavor. 30 years spent on this should have long since confirmed the opinions of most scientists: it’s a fools errand.

How about continuing the spending ON CONDITION that the producers, subcontractors, all employees, and the spending-dependent communities get and spend the money but that THEY DO NOT do the manuracturing and other work on the projects, instead using their time twiddling their thumbs, visiting a beach, or, if those get too boring, getting down to business and using their time investigating real community needs on which they can use their facilities and talents!

No need to fight about cutting the spending. Let it all keep rolling — at least for now — and just enforce its going in better directions.

And when it comes to military spending, even going nowhere is better for the world, the U.S. included, than going as it is for military ambitions!